A piping sounded, a tradition, it was said, dating from a time when man’s ships sailed only the seas of Earth. The officers muttered quiet orders. The military staff and civilians alike drew their ranks up a little tighter and stood rigidly to attention.

A party swept from the shadows into full Galaxy light. Marshal Kimmer and Minister Gramm accompanied a much more imposing figure. Philia Doon, Plenipotentiary for Total War, tall, slender, was dressed in a long golden cloak that swept around her feet. Her gait was graceful—and yet it was not quite natural, as if she used prosthetics, and her footsteps were loud and heavy, abnormally weighty. Kimmer was speaking to her, but she was looking into the sky, and Pirius had the impression that even as she took in Kimmer’s words, she was listening to some other voice only she could hear.

The skin of her slender face shone a subtle silver-gray. There wasn’t a hair on her head.

Doon took her place on a low platform. One by one the staff of the base were presented to her. Marshal Kimmer himself went up first, followed by Nilis, who bowed as he was handed some kind of elaborate data desk. Then Doon began to work her way through the officers, down the ladder of superiority.

When it was his turn, Pirius found his heart thumping as he approached this strange creature. She towered over him.

“Congratulations, Pilot,” the Plenipotentiary murmured. Her voice was rich, but too precise—artificial, he thought. She said, “Your squadron—Exultant—was well named.” But even as she talked there was no expression in that silvered face, and she didn’t even seem to be looking at him. She beckoned him closer, and he smelled a faint scent of burning. She pressed her hand to his chest, and when she lifted it away a bright green tetrahedral sigil glowed there, his new battle honor.

Pirius was very glad when the ceremony was over and they were allowed to break ranks.

Nilis approached Pirius. “Well, Pilot, now you have seen right to the very heart of our marvelous Third Expansion—and that is the type of creature that festers there.”

“You mean Plenipotentiary Doon?”

“She is what is called a raoul,” Nilis said. “Do you not recognize the texture of her skin?”

“I don’t know the technology.”

“Not technology. Not even biology—or at any rate, not human biology. That stuff is the hide of a Silver Ghost. The Plenipotentiary is a symbiote; she has the internal organs of a human, but the flesh of a Ghost. Oh, and she has implants tucked into her belly, I believe: more symbiotes, another conquered alien species living on within the bodies of our rulers, a group-mind entity that once, it is said, conquered the Earth, and is now used to provide instantaneous links between the Plenipotentiaries and their circle of chosen ones.